The Tutor's Story: A Case Study of Mixed Authorship
David L. Hoover · English Studies · 2012
The Victorian author Charles Kingsley (1819–1875) left a manuscript of part of a novel unfinished when he died in 1875. His daughter, Mary St. Leger Kingsley Harrison (1852–1931), who wrote under the name Lucas Malet, discovered the manuscript, finished the novel, and published it in 1915. In her preface, Malet describes the state, size, and nature of the manuscript, and this description gives a fairly solid basis for assigning at least parts of the novel to the two authors. She tells us that the beginning of the manuscript, and so presumably also the novel, was ‘‘fairly consecutive,'' so that we can expect the early chapters to be Kingsley's. But she also tells us that there were other ‘‘chapters and skeletons of chapters'' from much later in the story, without further indicating where these occur in the novel. Finally, she reports that the plot was unresolved, and that she doubled the size of the text in completing it. This suggests that the late chapters of the novel are probably mostly by Malet. This complex and difficult scenario provides a good opportunity for testing the effectiveness and limitations of some old and some new methods of authorship attribution, including PCA, Cluster Analysis, t-tests, Burrows's Delta, and Craig's version of Burrows's Zeta.